- Lean management practices
- Components of Lean management and its application to software delivery:
- Limit work in progress (WIP)
- Use these limits to drive process improvement and increase throughput
- WIP limits alone don't strongly predict delivery performance, but rather only when combined with visual displays and a feedback loop from production monitoring tools back to delivery teams
- WIP limits should lead to:
- Making obstacles to higher flow visible
- Removal of these obstacles through process improvement
- Leading to improved throughput
- WIP limits are no good if they don't lead to improvements that increase flow
- Visual management
- Create and maintain visual displays showing key quality and productivity metrics and current status of work
- Make these visual displays available to engineers and leaders
- Align metrics with operational goals
- Visibility should enable high-quality communication
- Feedback from production
- Use data from application performance and infrastructure monitoring tools to make business decisions on a daily basis
- Lightweight change approvals
- Further discussed later
- This ensures that teams don't become overburdened, and exposes obstacles to flow
- The combination of these practices increase delivery performance, have a positive impact on team culture and performance, and decrease burnout
- Implement a lightweight change management process
- Requiring external approval lead to lower performance and failed to increase stability
- Recommendation is to have a lightweight change approval process based on peer review, such as pair programming or intrateam code review, combined with a pipeline to detect and reject bad changes
- Risk management teams should be monitoring delivery performance and helping teams improve it by implementing practices that are know to increase stability, quality, and speed
Technology is always changing. It makes the industry interesting and exciting to work in, but it also makes it hard for you, as a developer, to keep up with the changes, let alone get ahead. And yet staying on top of these changes, and thriving because of them, is a rewarding and worthwhile goal, because by doing so, you unlock the potential of what you can accomplish. Here, I explore the how of doing just that.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Accelerate Chapter 7 Discussion Points
Moving on to chapter 7 of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations we'll discuss management practices: